Expedition 47 Flight Engineer Tim Peake of the European Space Agency took this striking photograph of the moon from his vantage point aboard the International Space Station on March 28, 2016. Peake (@astro_timpeake) shared the image on March 30 and wrote to his social media followers, “I was looking for #Antarctica – hard to spot from our orbit. Settled for a moonset instead.”
Image Credit: ESA/NASA
Source….www.nasa.gov
Natarajan
1. Singapore Changi International Airport (SIN)Yearly passengers: 54 million
Previous rank: 1
Why it’s awesome: For the fourth year in a row, Changi takes the crown as the world’s best airport. Changi serves as home to Singapore Airlines, Silkair, and Tigerair and is the 16th busiest airport in the world.
The Singaporean airport has received praise from flyers for its beautiful architecture, efficient operation, luxurious amenities, and broad offering of dining and shopping options.
Flyers passing through are treated to movie theaters, a multimedia entertainment deck, spas, and a wild corkscrew slide.
2.. Incheon International Airport (ICN)
Yearly passengers: 41.7 million
Previous rank: 2
Why it’s awesome: Once again, Incheon is the world’s second best airport. Located on an island just outside of the South Korean capital, Incheon is home base to Korean Air and is the 24th-busiest airport in the world. It opened in 2001.
Incheon’s highly regarded facilities feature an array of shopping and dining options, in addition to a bevy of cultural performances. The airport even has a Korean culture museum.
3. Munich Airport (MUC)
Yearly passengers: 38.7 million
Previous rank: 3
Why it’s awesome: Located northeast of downtown Munich, MUC is one of the busiest airports in Europe and the second-busiest in Germany, after Frankfurt.
Munich serves as a major hub for Air Berlin, Lufthansa, and Condor and it features airy glass-heavy architecture. A nearby visitors park features minigolf and a display of historic aircraft.
4. Tokyo Haneda International Airport (HND)
Yearly passengers: 72.8 million
Previous rank: 5
Why it’s awesome: Haneda is one of two major international airports that serve the Tokyo area. Located a few miles away from the heart of the Japanese capital, Haneda has proved to be a popular port of entry for business travelers and tourists.
The world’s fourth-busiest airport, Haneda is know for its service efficiency, cleanliness, and shopping.
5. Hong Kong International Airport (HKG)
Yearly passengers: 63.1 million
Previous rank: 4
Why it’s awesome: Built on an artificial island off the coast of Hong Kong, HKG has become one of the most popular facilities in the world since it opened in 1998.
One of the busiest airports in Asia, Hong Kong International serves as the home to Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong Airlines, and Dragonair.
Be sure to play a round at the SkyCity Nine Eagles golf course near Terminal 2.
6. Central Japan International Airport (NGO)
Yearly passengers: 9.8 million
Previous rank: 7
Why it’s awesome: Built on an artificial island in the middle of Ise Bay near the city of Nagoya, Central Japan International — also known as Centrair — serves as a focus city for Japan Airlines and ANA.
Centrair holds the distinction as the best regional airport in the world.
It has a 1,000-foot-long sky deck where passengers can watch ships sail into Nagoya Port. There’s also a traditional Japanese bathhouse where you can have a relaxing soak while watching the sunset over the bay.
7. Zurich Airport (ZRH)
Yearly passengers: 25.5 million
Previous rank: 6
Why it’s awesome: Just eight miles from the heart of Zurich, the airport serves as the home for Swiss International Air Lines and as a hub linking Switzerland’s largest city with the rest of the country.
For passengers with an extended layover, Zurich Airport offers bicycle and inline-skate rentals and excursions to the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne.
8. London Heathrow Airport (LHR)
Yearly passengers: 73.4 million
Previous rank: 8
Why it’s awesome: Heathrow is the world’s third-busiest airport and the largest of the five primary airports serving London.
Heathrow is in the midst of a major renovation with the addition of a brand new Terminal 2 building. It’s eight-year-old Terminal 5 building was named the best airport terminal in the world by Skytrax.
Heathrow serves as the main hub for British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.
9. Kansai International Airport (KIX)
Yearly passengers: 20 million
Previous rank: 12
Why it’s awesome: Located on an artificial island in the Osaka Bay, Kansai International is a major hub for ANA and Japan Airlines.
Reviewers on Skytrax praised Kansai for its modern architecture, spotless facilities, and helpful staff. The airport also boasts a Sky View observation deck that affords passengers spectacular views of incoming and outgoing flights.
10. Doha Hamad International Airport (DOH)
Yearly passengers: 30 million
Previous rank: 22
Why it’s awesome: Hamad International opened for business in 2014 and is now home to Qatar Airways.
The airport and its two terminals sit on 5,400 acres of land and cost $16 billion to construct. Skytrax describes the facility as the “the most architecturally significant terminal complex in the world, as well as being the most luxurious.
Source: Skytrax World Airport Awards.
http://www.worldairportawards.com
Natarajan
Italian street artist Biancoshock has just finished installing a couple of secret, miniature rooms, hidden under manhole covers, inside an abandoned sewer somewhere in the streets of Milan. This satiric “intervention” —a word that the artist uses for all his artworks— was inspired by the hundreds of people who are forced to live in extreme conditions, such as inside sewers, as in Bucharest where some 600 people live underground. Biancoshock calls this tiny project “Borderlife”.
If some problems can not be avoided, make them comfortable. -Biancoshock
via Colossal
Source…..www.amusingplanet.com
Natarajan
Srikanth Bolla, CEO of Bollant Industries, has set his sights on changing lives
Get rid of him. That was the first thing that neighbours told Srikanth Bolla’s parents when they came to see him soon after his birth in a remote village in the east coast of Andhra Pradesh 24 years ago. Bolla was born sightless.
That’s what, he says, scores of parents ordinarily did and still do – abandon babies born with disabilities. Instead, Bolla’s parents, who owned a small piece of land in the village and earned only about Rs 20,000 a year, chose to give him an education.
Today, Bolla is the CEO of Hyderabad-based Bollant Industries, a company with a turnover of around Rs 10 crore that employs uneducated and physically challenged people to manufacture eco-friendly, disposable consumer packaging solutions out of natural leaf and recycled paper.
Recently, Ratan Tata invested an undisclosed amount in the company. Other investors include Srini Raju of Peepul Capital, Satish Reddy of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories and Ravi Mantha, one of India’s more prolific angel investors.
Bolla started out by accompanying his father to the farm but found he could not be of much help. So his father decided to send him to school, which was some 5 km away from home. For two years, he says, nobody acknowledged his presence in school and he was made to sit on the last bench. Fellow students did not accept him during physical training periods.
For the first time in his life, he says, he felt he was the poorest child in the world because he was so lonely.
His father then moved him to a school for special children in Hyderabad, where he started topping his class and also played chess and cricket. Later, he worked with former president APJ Abdul Kalam on the Lead India project, a movement to empower the youth through value-based education.
However, despite scoring 90 per cent in Class X, he was not allowed to take up the science stream because, he claims, he was blind. “I was made blind by the perception of people,” he says. With the option of science refused to him, everybody thought he would settle for the commerce stream. Instead, Bolla sued the state government. “Moving away from the problem is not in my blood,” he says.
After six months of fighting it out, he was allowed to take up science with the rider that he was doing so “at his own risk”. By this time, half of the academic year was over and Bolla did not have books or any other study material.
A mentor at the college he joined converted all lessons into audio books. Bolla passed with 98 per cent. But another hurdle followed. He says he was not allowed to apply for competitive exams because he was blind.
So, he started applying to universities in the United States and got admission in four of them, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University. He opted for MIT and was its first international blind student.
In 2012, after graduating from MIT, he launched Bollant Industries. The company now has around 450 employees, 60 per cent of whom are differently-abled.
The company, with five plants in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka, has started work to set up a larger facility at Sri City in Andhra Pradesh with an investment of Rs 10-15 crore. It currently exports 10-15 per cent of its produce to the US, Australia and Germany.
Life, he says, has taught him many lessons. Compassion is one of them. “Compassion,” he says, “is not about giving a coin to a beggar at the traffic signal. It’s showing somebody the way to live and giving them the opportunity to thrive.”
The world looked at him and said you can do nothing, says Bolla. “But I look up at the world and say I can do anything.”
Photograph, kind courtesy: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Source…..www.rediff.com
Natarajan
Whether it’s organic farming, livestock rearing or dairy farming, these people quit their comfortable, high paying jobs to go back to their roots and take up farming.
Many dream of quitting their jobs or taking a sabbatical to find a new calling, see the world, indulge in art or pass time with nature. To some, the practice of farming involves all of those and more. The smell of Earth, the moo of cows, the open skies, the excitement of the first rain, the delight in the first sprout – there lies a simple joy in farming. Here are a few stories of people who took the plunge and never regretted it:
Akshayakalp head G N S Reddy
In Bengaluru, Shashi Kumar, Ranjith Mukundan, Venkatesh Sesasaye and Praveen Nale, all employed as software engineers, decided to quit their jobs in 2011. They teamed up with a group of dairy farming enthusiasts to form the Akshayakalpa Farms and Food Ltd, headed by G N S Reddy. At this farm, located in Hassan in Karnataka, the health of cows is of primary concern. Their health is electronically monitored daily, along with the milk production capability. Besides this, about 500 farmers have employment with a sure-shot chance of getting monetarily rewarded. The farm sells 4000 litres of milk daily, and has expanded to a farm in Mysore.
Slogging it out in the IT industry for nearly a decade had burnt out Santosh Singh. While he went on a sabbatical for two years, his brothers Rajesh and Sathish joined him. On their three-acre ancestral land in Haalenahalli, about 40 kilometres from Bengaluru, they set up Amrutha Dairy Farms with just three cows. In a short time, the farm expanded to accommodate 100 cows, backed by NABARD. Even though there was a drought that led to lower milk production, they stayed. Soon, they started rearing heifer (cows that haven’t borne calves) and launched the production of paneer and cheese in 2014.
Rajendra (left) and Rego (right), the organic farmers at Green Souls
Mumbai-based Sabita Rajendran and Julius Rego are part of a new breed of urban farmers who have taken up growing organic food as their true calling. In 2011, Rajendran quit her job in advertising, while Rego moved out of furniture dealership. Their need to avoid eating pesticide-laden food and chemically soiled water inspired them to start Green Souls in 2012, with an initial investment of just Rs 20,000. Along with vegetables and fruits, they also cultivate medicinal herbs and flowering plants, which they donate to the Tata Memorial Hospital.
Instead of being an armchair critic and sympathiser, Anand from Mysore gave up his position as a software engineer and set up a farm where he practices organic farming. Besides his passion for all things green and healthy, he also felt deeply about making farmers live sustainably through farming. He purchased six acres of land in Shadanahalli, Mysore, and started organic farming. He then created various groups for farmers, and invited them to explore how and why it would be feasible to take up organic farming. Helping not just himself but also a large collective of organic farmers, he tries to open the market up to organic products.
Nikki and Gaurav Chaudhary; Nikki was appreciated by World Congress on Agroforestry recently
Gaurav and Nikki Chaudhary realised that they earned more money and peace of mind through agroforestry than they would have in their corporate jobs. Gaurav is an economics post-graduate from Delhi School of Economics, and Nikki studied business economics from London. They were inspired by Gaurav’s father, Chaudhary Veerpal Singh, a farmer who toiled the Earth for many years to give his son an education. Gaurav, who had thought of going back to farming when he was in high school, raises poplar, eucalyptus and other plantations with his wife in Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh. They also run the Progressive Dairy Farmers Association. Nikki recently got appreciated by the World Congress on Agroforestry for her blog post that detailed their journey. They believe that farming needs intelligence and professionalism to get successful.
T. Arumugam from Chennai worked with an NGO and was the first graduate in his family with five siblings. When he decided to get into the agriculture sector, everyone in his family had major misgivings, except his mother. To prove that he could make good out of it, he took up studying and attending training programmes first. He learnt the ropes from workshops and short courses provided by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU). According to him, Indian youth should go back to farming, being a largely agrarian economy. That’s what drove him to take up rearing livestock and wheat farming.
Source……Neeti Vijaykumar in http://www.the betterindia.com
Natarajan
Swati Bondia has created a powerful story of social entrepreneurship. At the age of 18, she started a handicrafts business that helped over 1000 people from the streets start leading dignified lives.
Five years ago, at a busy traffic signal where Bangaloreans waited impatiently for the light to turn green, a little girl went begging frantically from one vehicle to another, racing against the time the red signal gave her. As serendipity would have it, she stretched her hand towards Swati Bondia, an 18-year-old college girl. Swati refused to give her money. In a reaction that was totally unexpected, the child started crying. As heads turned and eyes rolled, Swati was left flustered. She quickly got down from the auto, took the girl aside and tried to pacify her.
Swati gasped. She was now terribly angry with the child’s mother and couldn’t control her desire to confront her and question her cruelty. Swati asked the girl to take her to her mother. Her mind was crowded with questions that she would ask of her.
But she was in for her second shock of the day. Where she expected to see an exploitative mother, she saw the face of a helpless migrant woman who lived on the streets with her children and an alcoholic husband. The family had travelled all the way from Rajasthan looking for work. But no one was ready to trust them and give them jobs. Begging, then, became the family’s only option.
For the next couple of days, Swati went around looking for jobs for the migrant family. This hunt made her realise what such families go through in finding their footing.
Companies and households simply refused to give jobs to migrants, unwilling to take the risk of trusting total strangers whose identities they couldn’t trace.
Disappointed, Swati decided to go back to the family and apologise that she had failed to find them work. However, when she walked into their shelter, she saw a different scene altogether. The alcoholic husband had shaved and tidied himself. The children had not gone to beg. The mother was beaming with hope that their life was about to change. Looking at them, Swati could not bring herself to say that she had not succeeded.
She decided she would be the one to create jobs for them.
She sat down with them to find out what they could do. The family knew the art of making handicrafts so Swati decided to give handicraft making a try. She bought them some raw material for Rs 250 and they made beautiful crafts from it. Now it was time to be back at the busy signal.
Encouraged by their achievement and now confident of themselves, the family started making more handicrafts. Swati took their products beyond the traffic signals of Bangalore, under the banner of Om Shanti Traders. She sold their handicraft items as corporate and hospitality gifts. The takers for the products grew and so did the number of families that became part of Om Shanti Traders. Seeing the change she had brought to the life of the first family she helped, more and more street dwellers wanted to become part of Swati’s organization.
One thousand individuals who would otherwise be begging on the streets are able to earn up to Rs. 10,000 per month and lead dignified lives. Swati grew the business to set up a factory and provide accommodation facilities for these families. When families sign up with Om Shanti Traders, Swati insists they commit to sending their girl children to school; she funds this initiative herself. She notes that the boys have been a difficult lot to keep in school but is trying to ensure that happens as well.
All the while that she was changing the lives of street people, Swati continued to lead her life as a college student as well. She completed her BBM and MBA, efficiently juggling her studies with her social enterprise. Swati has now started her new entrepreneurial venture, which provides virtual exhibition services. Her company, Enrich Expo, provides scholarships to children from 12 different villages, each village getting Rs. 20 lakh. As she builds one entrepreneurial venture after another, she says she wants to eventually realize her vision of bridging the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged.
Source….Ranjini Sivaswamy in http://www.the betterindia.com
natarajan
Thanks to the development of nano-technology, it will now be possible to measure how effective a round of cancer therapy is, within hours of the treatment. This project has been kick-started by a group of Indian scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Medical School.
“We have developed a nano-technology, which first delivers an anticancer drug specifically to the tumour, and if the tumour starts dying or regressing, it then starts lighting up the tumour in real time,” Shiladitya Sengupta, a principal investigator at MIT’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), told PTI.
The breakthrough was published online in ‘The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.’ One of the authors of the paper is Ashish Kulkarni, who hails from a tiny village in the state of Maharashtra. Kulkarni pursued his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Cincinnati. “Our long-term goal is to find a way to monitor outcomes very early so that we don’t give a chemotherapy drug to patients who are not responding to it,” he said.
Current tracking methods, which are based on the measurements of the size or the metabolic state of the tumour, don’t always manage to detect the effectiveness of the treatment.
Source….Boshika Gupta in http://www.the betterindia.com
Natarajan
A clear day over one of the world’s two great ice sheets.
A science mission called the Oceans Melting Greenland field campaign is flying NASA’s G-III aircraft at about 40,000 feet over Greenland. On a clear day, this altitude also provides a stunning perspective of one of the world’s two great ice sheets (the other is Antarctica). The flight Saturday, March 26, 2016, over the northeast coastline was one of those clear days. Read more about this image. Image via NASA.
Source…..www.earthsky.org
Natarajan
| “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.“
You may interact with negative people daily, be they friends, family members, a partner or a colleague. You love them, you care about them, you can’t just cut them out of your life, but they are negative and their negativity is eating away at you. What can you do?
The best way of dealing with life’s challenges is to take a good look at ourselves and take responsibility for what we think, feel and do.
Never give your power away by blaming others for what you have or don’t have, what you feel or don’t feel. Once you do so, you’ll become a victim of circumstance, and instead of using your time and energy to beat life’s challenges, you’ll sink to a dark and miserable place.
Here are 10 smart, positive and effective ways of dealing with the negativity of the people close to you:
1. Give up the need to complain
Make sure you are taking responsibility for your feelings and mood. Don’t go complaining that other people’s negativity is affecting you, because it will only create more negativity. Take responsibility for your thoughts and feelings and see what you can do to make yourself feel better and change the existing situation.
“Whoever has limited knowledge of human nature and seeks happiness by changing everything but his own attitude, will waste his life in futile efforts.”
– Samuel Johnson  2. Similarity Attracts
Good brings about good, bad brings about bad, and whether we want to or not, we pull into our lives events, situations and people that reflect our internal state. Ask yourself: “How am I feeling? Am I happy, excited, thankful and calm? Or am I anxious, frustrated and judgmental?”
You may find that you radiate misery to the environment and that part of the negative energy surrounding you is in fact a reflection of yourself.
3. Don’t believe everything you think
This is definitely one of the hardest things to learn. Look closely at the negative people in your life. What is it about them that gets you going? What affects you so much? Is what they are doing really that bad or is your brain playing games with you?
Remember, the brain is configured to look for trouble, and it focuses on other’s negative qualities. It’ll be very hard to get it to see the positive side of things, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
4. Focus
Ask yourself: “Am I ready to find the good in these people? Am I able to see their good qualities?” Let the answers come naturally, and make sure you are being honest with yourself.
If you feel like you’re insistent and won’t change the way you are looking at people and situations, don’t give yourself a hard time. This takes time and patience, and when you are ready, you’ll take this step. Remember, we all have good in us.
“It’s so hard when I NEED to do it and so easy when I WANT to do it.”
– Annie Gottlier 5. Don’t make their problems YOUR problems
For their sake and yours, make sure you are not adopting their problems and becoming negative about them yourself. If you want to cure negativity, sliding down right along with the negative person won’t help, it will just make it worse by validating their thought and behavioral patterns. Rather, focus on solutions, not problems. Offer that and nothing else.
6. Taking ownership
Instead of being a victim and judge, you need to take full responsibility for your thoughts and feelings, and take a different approach.
“Everything that annoys us in others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.”
– Carl Jung. Don’t waste your time obsessing and thinking: “They are ruining my energy, making me miserable, their negative energy is infecting my own…” Instead, say to yourself: “How can I use this to my advantage? Is there something I’m doing wrong? How can I improve the situation and increase my positive energy to be stronger than their negative energy? What do I learn from all of this?”
7. Come with your own positive energy
Focusing on negative energy cannot create positive energy, and the other way around is also true. Focus on making yourself happy, enough that you have great positive energy, and you will see the negativity cringing away from it.
Remember, energy is contagious!
How to put up positive energy? Focus on the things you like about the negative people, focus on things you love about yourselves, life and the world around you. Think of loved ones, of things that make you happy. That way, you will increase the positive energy exponentially.
If you incur negative energy by thinking about bad things, the opposite is also true, and you’ll be able to hopefully ‘wake up’ your fellow workers. You can’t focus on both of them at the same time, so choose one – happiness or misery.
8. Be part of the change you’d like to see
The world is no more than a reflection of who we are, deep inside. Try to go for a feeling of well-being, to live a positive life, a merry life, one that has love, trust, and the pursuit of happiness. We cannot change others, but only ourselves. This is the only way to change the world.
Think of it this way: When you are happy, the world seems happy, and the sky is open and blue. When you are sad, the world seems sad as well, and the sky is grey and uncaring, leaving you alone to deal with your pain.
Flow with life events, don’t resist them, live in harmony and be the change you wish to see in the world.
“Never underestimate your power to change yourself. Never overestimate your power to change others.”
– Wayne W. Dyer 9. Awareness and acceptance
Work on understanding life’s inevitable duality – accept the negative with the good. Don’t harp on people’s negativity, don’t judge or fight them. Let them be, look and accept. Remember, your world is no more real than a reflection of who you are, deep inside. Don’t try to bring everyone into your own world, accept theirs as no less real than yours, and their point of view as no less valid.
The hardest part of acceptance is accepting that, sometimes, some people cannot be changed. Their negativity is something they will defend to the last drop. Not because it gives them pleasure, but because they think it is a natural part of themselves.
Even though it’s never too late to try and change that point of view, some never will. It is up to you to either accept their negativity and react accordingly, or take your distance from them. This is especially hard when it is someone we love.
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of others.“
Image courtesy of: Michal Marcol / freedigitalphotos.net Source….www.ba-mail.com Natarajan |
Take off with Natarajan 